News July 2017

What is expected to be Europe’s largest community battery is set to be installed at an innovative regeneration scheme in Nottingham, with a 2MWh Tesla battery to be deployed in September as part of a housing scheme alongside community solar. The £100 million Trent Basin project is a new housing development built at the site of an inland dock previously derelict for around two decades. It is expected to deliver 500 homes over five phases with 375kW of rooftop and ground mounted solar and the Tesla battery to be installed by EvoEnergy. In an innovative use of the solar farm, planning permission has been granted on the basis that the site shall be cleared by 28 February 2020. By this time, the panels from the ground mounted installation will be removed and installed on new homes built as part of the development.

Turbines for the world’s first floating wind farm are set to arrive in Scottish waters within weeks after taking to the seas off Norway. Five turbines for the £200 million Hywind project, being built by Statoil, the Norwegian energy group, were floated near Stord island on the country’s southwest coast. They will be towed on a four-day journey to a location 16 miles off Peterhead. The five turbines, standing 175m above sea level, are kept afloat by ballasted steel cylinders that extend 78m beneath the waves. Each will be attached to the seabed by chains. Together they should generate up to 30 megawatts of power, enough to supply 20,000 homes.

Bristol Energy Cooperative is seeking to crowdfund more than £1 million which will help to pay for its maiden battery storage investment. Earlier this week the community energy group announced its intention to raise a total of £1.15 million, the proceeds of which will help repay previous loans and invest in a Tesla Powerpack installation planned for a community housing scheme in Winchester. The bulk of the planned raising will however go towards the repayment of short-term loans from Close Brothers and Bristol City Council which it used to complete solar PV projects prior to reductions in the feed-in tariff.

Moixa secured £2.5 million of funding in the first quarter of 2017 which it will use to pursue a goal of installing 50,000 home battery systems by the end of the decade. A £1 million funding facility from Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) will see Moixa open a regional sales and delivery centre in the city, with around 20 local staff expected to be employed within a year. The office will drive the company’s growth in the north west by offering solar and storage products to private customers and pursuing multi-thousand unit deployments with social housing clients. Speaking to Solar Power Portal yesterday, Moixa’s founder and chief executive Simon Daniel explained: “We were looking to set up a support centre in mid-England as a lot of our housing stock for social housing is in that area. Manchester has over 1.2 million homes, Liverpool half a million and there’s a lot of new house building going on in that area.

Global research institute McKinsey & Company has analyzed current energy storage prices and concluded that commercial customers are already feeling the economic benefits of cheaper batteries and recent price falls in lithium-ion technology. With battery-pack costs now down to less than $230/kWh – compared to around $1,000/kWh as recently as 2010 – storage uptake is on the rise across Europe, Asia and the U.S. This growth is being facilitated by a greater uptick in electric vehicle (EV) adoption, with major players now scaling-up their lithium-ion manufacturing capacity in order to meet demand.

When the US president, Donald Trump, announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, one might have anticipated a hearty cheer from industry around the world relieved that business as usual could continue. Instead the opposite has happened. Across the United States, the business community is taking it upon itself to implement the measures needed to address climate change. And in Australia an increasing number of major companies are publicly stating their commitment to addressing climate change, even as the federal government drags its heels on implementing policies to address the crisis. Companies around the world – from small family-run enterprises to Fortune 500 firms – are not only calling for action on climate change but also putting their money where their mouth is.

Clients have included Greenpeace, Nuclear Free Local Authorities, WWF Scotland and the UK Government’s Committee on Radioactive Waste Management.

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